The proposed study will investigate the determinants of child support payment performance. Two new data sets will be used to test an econometric-demographic model aimed at estimating the relative importance of a number of factors in explaining the variation in award status, recipiency status and payments due. The following explanatory factors will be included: measures of the father's ability to pay, the mother's potential earnings and alternative sources of income, the needs of the children, and the penalties imposed by the legal enforcement system. The data sets to be used are the merged March-April 1979 Current Population Survey (CPS) and the merged March-June Surveys (CPS). One goal of this analysis is to establish whether increasing the penalties and/or changing specific legal enforcement practices can affect payment performance. Another question with policy implications is whether the existence of a high level of welfare benefits reduces private transfers to children by the absent father. A second type of analysis will compare the dollar amount of child support payments with estimates of what per-child expenditures would have been had the child remained in an intact family. Such information can be highly useful in developing methods for evaluating the adequacy and fairness of child support payments and for determining optimal levels of payments by the custodial and absent parents.